A sponge could act as a part of a computer

From what sound like a computer inside which the calculation is done by a sponge instead of traditional components?

Researchers from The Ohio State University discovered that edible mushroom species, such as boletus or shiitake, could act as a kind of computer component.

Mushroom myceliums were successfully programmed so that they function like a memory resistor, i.e. a memristor. So the fungus could remember its previous electrical states.

Memristors are modern computer components that can maintain a certain resistance even forever.

The group research announced the science magazine Plos One.

Researchers grew a Petri dish full of fungal mycelium and dried the samples for about a week.

After that, the mushroom mycelia were moistened to make them conduct electricity better. The mushroom samples were attached with strings and sensors as part of the circuit, and they were electrified at different frequencies and voltages.

Two months later, a team of researchers tested the samples. They found that the mushroom memristor could change its electronic state 5850 times per second.

So it worked as a kind of biological computer memory. The study was published in the scientific journal Plos One.

Physical professor Petriina Beds consider research wild.

“It remains to be seen whether there will ever really be a mushroom computer, it would be great,” he reflects.

The trump card of the mushroom memristor is its environmental friendliness. Mushroom mycelium can be grown cheaply and easily, and it does not require, for example, the digging of heavy metals.

The American researchers raised the size of the mushroom memristor as one of the problems, because the studied samples were large.

The researchers considered that they could try to cultivate mushrooms in smaller 3d-printed molds, in which case the mushroom mycelium could be grown into the desired shape.

A memristor machine would be able to start immediately.

Computer science is hardly coming to the market right away, because even ordinary metallic memristors have not been able to be widely used in technology so far.

Conventional computers have remained the same in their technological principles since they were invented.

A computer always has a processor and memory, and all calculations are done by transferring data from the memory to the processor and back with continuous input.

“This is a bottleneck that limits the power of computers. Until now, the power of computers has been increased by increasing the number of processors and memory,” says Paturi.

In a memristor-powered computer, data transfer would no longer be necessary, as the calculation and memory would be in the same unit.

The usual it always takes some time to start the computer, because it has to fetch things from the memory again.

A memristor machine would be able to start immediately. Even if the computer ran out of battery, it would start up from exactly the same state it had left. The view would be the same and unsaved jobs would not have been lost.

In order for this to be possible, the atoms must be made to stay in their fields inside the memristor. There are several different types of memristors, says Paturi.

A memristor has been developed at the University of Turku, in which oxygen atoms are moved with a small voltage from one place to another at the interface of the materials that make up the memristor.

The oxygen atoms settle into the potential wells and no longer move away from them by themselves.

of memristors the uses would not be limited to just computers or phones. Together with artificial intelligence, they could enable, for example, autonomous robots that would not need to be connected to a cloud service in order to function.

“The artificial intelligence would be right there in the autonomous robot and make decisions by itself.”

According to Patur, memristors are becoming more and more relevant, because calculations made with them save energy up to a million times.

“An individual data center consumes as much electricity as a small nuclear power plant. If the same calculation were done with memristor-based neural networks, the energy would be equivalent to a couple of electric stoves.”

Published in Tiede magazine 1/2026.